In the darkly comic mythological fable Cracking Zeus, playwright Christopher T. Hampton brings a vengeful goddess down to earth. But while the play, inventively staged by Reginald L. Douglas, reaches for divine comedy, Spooky Action Theatre’s production remains earthbound.
The angry deity in question is Hera (Nicole Ruthmarie), who deigns to set foot on Earth for the sole purpose of exacting revenge on one of her husband Zeus’ many mistresses by punishing the progeny of their affair.
That mistress would be Momma Jo (Lolita Marie), the founder, owner, treasurer, and pastor of a street corner chapel in the ’90s inner city, and her son Baniaha (Charles Franklin IV), the congregation’s youth group leader, is the ill-fated son of Zeus. Although, Baniaha doesn’t know who his father is.
He also doesn’t know that, like many a Bible thumper, Momma Jo didn’t use to walk the straight-and-narrow. But Rufus (DeJeanette Horne), the so-called “crackhead” who squats on the sidewalk outside the church, he knows. He claims to know a lot about Jo’s life before she found Jesus, while she does her best to keep the church youth far away from him and whatever truth he might reveal.
Still, drug-addled Rufus winds up holding court on the chapel’s new marble steps, pontificating sometimes wisely about the blights ravaging the city, and about the goddess who, at first, appears only to him. In a dynamic performance, Horne spins Rufus’ street philosopher revelries into a rich portrait of a mind and soul lost to addiction, though perhaps not irrevocably.
Marie’s jittery, domineering Momma Jo similarly offers a dense, colorful palette of tics and emotions that fill in some of those blanks she keeps buried in the past. In their vital supporting turns, Horne and Marie amp up the tension.
Playing the youth choir members, Bowie State’s Jacobie Thornton, and Howard U. acting students Destiny Jennings, Dupre Isaiah, and Christina Daniels as the most kindhearted of them, bring vibrant comedic energy to their roles as a veritable Greek chorus.
The emotional weight of the piece falls on Hera and Baniaha, however, and, in those roles, respectively, Ruthmarie and Franklin register the intention without the full force of feeling behind it.
Gorgeously costumed, if not that originally, in goddess white throughout, Ruthmarie conveys Hera’s haughtiness, expressed in her plummy, eloquent speeches. The language rolls off Ruthmarie’s tongue and sits there, a mellifluous sound signifying disdain and displeasure, but disconnected from the hurt and humiliation that might motivate this queen to plot something so evil as getting someone hooked on crack.
Douglas’ production realizes Hampton’s fanciful depiction of the crack-ridden ’90s with astute design and details — like the Washington Bullets jersey and FUBU tee on the kids — that also evoke the story’s nods to ancient Greek myth. From the chapel’s marble steps, to the Greek drama-masked figures whose haunting dance interludes signal a descent into a crack high, ancient and modern religion meet on Momma Jo’s corner.
There, Hampton lands the play’s surest insight, that crack didn’t just happen to the hood, but was a deliberately wielded weapon of mass destruction.
Cracking Zeus (★★☆☆☆) runs through Oct. 13, at Universalist National Memorial Church, 1810 16th St. NW. Tickets are $15 to $38. Call 202-248-0301, or visit www.spookyaction.org.
Much like the recent Akira Kurosawa Explains His Movies and Yogurt (with Live & Active Cultures!) at Woolly Mammoth, Emily Burns' Frankenstein, now at The Shakespeare Theatre, clings to the bumper of a more established artist's life and work.
Whereas Akira wrapped itself around one of film's finest auteurs, Burns uses Mary Shelley's gothic classic along with context from Shelley's life to make points, various and sundry. Although there is more substance here than in Akira, hitching a ride with Frankenstein feels equally unnecessary. Because, shed the gothic set and references to a monster, and this play is basically a portrait of a modern marriage.
Brent Askari's Andy Warhol in Iran could shift some theatergoers' perspectives on a variety of complicated topics, from the junction of art and commerce, to Western interference in the affairs of modern Iran.
Making its D.C. premiere at Mosaic in a crisply-mounted production directed by Serge Seiden, the tidy two-hander takes on a world of troublesome issues without ever leaving a luxury hotel room in Tehran.
That's where the artist Andy Warhol (Alex Mills) is holed up, having been invited by the wife of the Shah, Empress Farah, to create pop-art portraits of her and the royal family.
Returning to the scene of an uproarious crime, Everyman Theatre revives Charles Ludlam's cross-dressing farce The Mystery of Irma Vep: A Penny Dreadful, with several key players from the company's hit 2009 production back in all their glory.
First, Ludlam's spoof of Victorian manor mysteries and melodramas absolutely holds up as a well-built laugh machine powered by an indomitable cast of two. Created in the midst of the AIDS crisis expressly to provide levity at a time of despair and uncertainty, The Mystery of Irma Vep is as apt as ever in providing an outlet for processing the absurdity all around us.
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